508 ON THE PRICE OF BUILDING MATERIALS. 



namely, which lies between the wooded hills of Maidenhead, 

 Wycombe, and Marlow, till the boat rested at Henley, then 

 the highest point to which' the navigation of the Thames was 

 ordinarily possible. The bailiff is present to receive his goods, 

 and soon gets ready the service which he finds it will be more 

 convenient to employ on the spot, by purchasing iron and 

 steel, by hiring a smith to fashion his steel into picks or awls, 

 and by engaging the services of three men for three days in 

 the labour of boring the stones a labour of no trifling cha- 

 racter, as the smith is perpetually occupied in sharpening the 

 tools. 



As Oldman was going to and from London, he passed Tyburn, 

 the place thenceforward to be memorable in the annals of crime, 

 where Mortimer had, a few months since, been hanged, wood 

 and field lying on either side. Oldman 6 had experience during 

 the long tenure of his office of the licence which royal favour- 

 ites assumed, and had more than once been constrained to 

 debit his masters with the losses inflicted by the rapacity of 

 Edward the Second's latest favourite. Matters had not mended 

 since Hugh Spenser had been executed, and Roger Mortimer had 

 been elevated into the post of the queen's favourite. Now, 

 however, the insolent paramour of the queen had shared the 

 fate of the king's profligate friend. At first indeed it might 

 have seemed that the downfall of that king, who had so dis- 

 honoured the great name of his father by his incapacity in 

 dealing with the northern enemies of England, would be fol- 

 lowed by a more vigorous and successful policy. But Mortimer 



e The whole family of the Oldmans perished, it seems, in the Plague. Remote as their 

 existence is, and impersonal as they must be to my reader, they have lived to me, and 

 the extinction of the continuous record of their painstaking and honest life gave me, when 

 I came, as I did in the Cuxham series, upon the first evidence of the great calamity of the 

 fourteenth century, the clearest and saddest insight into the magnitude of that terrible 

 Death. Out of the many thousand accounts which I have investigated none equal those 

 of Cuxham for intelligence, accuracy, and order. The loss of such men as the Oldmans 

 must have been painfully felt. But grievous as the suffering of all men at that time was, 

 it gave the nation a hope, and a means of real progress. Perhaps, were its effects capable 

 of exact estimate, the Great Death was more critical than any of those events to which the 

 superficial induction of common history assigns such important results. 



